Primor signs €3m Korean beauty LOI

Perfumerías Primor, a Spanish family retailer operating more than 150 stores across Spain and Portugal and an e-commerce platform that draws over 17 million users, has signed a €3 million letter of intent to distribute Korean beauty products, the largest single outcome from the K-Expo trade consultation event held in Madrid on 12 and 13 June 2026.

The LOI gives Korean beauty brands immediate access to Spain's largest value-positioned beauty retail network at a single stroke, alongside Primor's existing expansion into Portugal, France, and Italy.

The event was organised by the Federation of Korean Business Associations in Europe (FKBAE), a body established in 2004 that brings together Korean business leaders across 21 European countries. FKBAE operates through embedded, long-resident Korean business communities in each country, combined with government-backed matchmaking infrastructure. That combination lets it run a model that neither a visiting trade delegation nor a ministry-only programme can replicate at the same local depth.

Across two days at the Madrid Exhibition and Events Universe in Chamartín, 575 B2B export consultations produced 47 closed outcomes with a cumulative consultation value of €22.14 million (approximately 39 billion won). Around 100 Korean SMEs participated, the majority in K-food and K-beauty, drawn from companies backed by regional governments including Incheon City, North Gyeongsang Province, South Jeolla Province, and Geumsan County, as well as South Korea's Ministry of SMEs and Startups. Approximately 70 members of World-OKTA, the World Federation of Overseas Korean Traders Associations, participated on the buyer side across Europe, providing a pre-vetted pool that widened both the scale and the quality of consultations.

The commercial context is structural. South Korea overtook the United States in 2025 to become the world's second-largest cosmetics exporter, recording $11.4 billion in exports, trailing only France at $24.3 billion. K-food exports reached a record $13.62 billion in the same year, up 5.1% year-on-year, with food products alone crossing $10 billion for the first time in ten consecutive years of growth. With US and Chinese market shares shifting, Europe has become a strategic diversification target for Korean exporters, and the Madrid event was a direct commercial response to that pressure.

K-Expo 2026 was the first Korean trade fair of this type staged in Southern Europe, giving brands without prior Iberian distribution a first-mover entry point. A comparable government-ministry event, K-Expo Spain 2025, featured 65 companies under the integrated brand "All About K-Style" in September 2025 but did not publish a named LOI outcome. FKBAE's 2026 edition ran a larger exhibitor pool under a private-diaspora model and produced the Primor LOI as its headline result.

FKBAE has stated its intention to establish K-Expo as a standing business platform, expanding participation by domestic local governments and corporations and deepening matching with local distribution networks.

The Primor LOI converts a diaspora-built matchmaking infrastructure into a named retail contract, establishing a direct route for Korean beauty brands into the Iberian market and the broader Southern European retail footprint Primor already serves.